Day: June 9, 2012

[Hairygael] has been hard at work designing and building this robot structure that can be completely 3d printed. He’s admittedly not a big electronics person, so most of his focus has been on the design and construction of the bot frame. So far, he as a fully 3d printable (and available for download) hand that you can see in action after the break. Once printed, you’ll have to drill it for your own servos and add your own control system.

You can see the action is quite nice and sturdy in the video. [Hairygael] laments his lack of electronics knowledge when you see him hit roadblocks like multiple finger control. But, just as he points out in the video, we’re positive that some of you who are more familiar with that end of things will undoubtedly make this work well.

Whether it’s building a 3D scanning system with a Kinect, or using a USB TV tuner dongle for software defined radio, there are a lot of interesting off-schedule uses for commodity hardware. The latest comes from the fruitful mind of [sjMoquin] and a Lexmark N2050 WiFi card that runs Linux.

This build started off with a Lexmark X6570 all-in-one printer available for about $100 USD on eBay. This printer comes packaged with a Lexmark N2050 WiFi card running BusyBox. After soldering a few wires to the USB/UART pins on the N2050, [sjMoquin] had a very cheap but highly useful single board computer running Linux.

There is still a little more work to be done – the WiFi and USB on the N2050 aren’t currently supported. [sjMoquin] and [Julia Longtin] are working on that, so a fully functional embedded Linux board based on a printer’s WiFi card should be available soon. It might be time to hit up eBay for a few of these cards, you know.

At the beginning of the school last year, [Ryan] needed to come up with a project for his master’s thesis. Having a bachelor’s in mech. engineering and doing his graduate work in software engineering allowed [Ryan] to do something really cool for his thesis; he decided to turn an iPhone into an autonomous robot with live video streaming, remote control, and object detection.

One of the more interesting features of [Ryan]’s ArduiPhone is the ability to stream video directly from the phone to a Java application. Instead of FaceTime, [Ryan] streams videos by converting an image from the front-facing iPhone camera to a byte array, sends it over the network, and decodes the image in a Java app. It’s low-level stuff, but the video quality is excellent and something we’ll probably be seeing more of in the future.

Multitouch builds are all the rage now, so it’s not surprising someone would come up with a multi-touchless interface sooner or later. [Hanspeter] did just that; his Multi-touchless ribbon controller, a.k.a. Polymagnetophonic Theremin is multi-touch without the touch.

[Hanspeter]’s touchless ribbon controller uses an array of 24 Hall effect sensors that activate whenever a magnet mounted on a thimble is placed near a build. These sensors go to an ARM-equipped Maple Mini to record multitouch events and send them out over Ethernet.

Even though [Hanspeter] is only using his “multi-touchless ribbon sensor” as a theremin, there’s no reason why it couldn’t be put to other uses. It’s entirely possible to place several of these magnetic sensors in an array and build a real Minority Report interface where the user interacts with a computer without touching anything.

After the break is a video demo showing off how much control [Hanspeter] can get with the thimble/magnet setup. There’s also a few demo songs made with SuperCollider showing off a trio of sitar/Moog/harpsichord synths.